skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm so with you on this, but also split. I get it - you want someone to prove a baseline ability. However, I'd like to think someone who wants to hire 'awesome' developers will do some non-standard things like... you know, checking out that developer's code repos on github/bitbucket/sf, reading their blog, watching them present, etc. Granted, not everyone does this of course, but some do.

I applied some place (at the recommendation of a few colleagues who thought I'd be a good fit), and got extremely basic 'who are you?' sort of questions - the interviewer clearly hadn't read my resume at all. "What do you know about our service?" "Well... your marketing person tweeted and promoted some open source code that I released to run on your service last month..." "Oh". "And I've blogged about your service and published some user group videos about using your service over the last year or so". "Oh".

Just like employers want to avoid time-wasting candidates who can't do basic fizzbuzz stuff, many of us want to avoid wasting time with potential employers who can't extend a basic courtesy like doing 3 minutes of googling about a candidate before talking to them on the phone.
Thanks for the feedback. Particularly in NYC, we felt that mobile-first would satisfy most people since they can book on their way home, and even if they're in their home, they usually have their phone next to them before their computer. Having said that, booking via desktop will come VERY soon. In the meantime, you can also book via mobile web (go to getmaid.com on any smartphone), not just iOS.
Facebook is probably showing you updates of probably around 120 - 150 of active people, with about 7-20 very active close friends. And as someone has already mentioned, this has been proven against Dunbar's Number, and in other studies.
This service is GREAT for a person who:

1) only needs maid service occasionally, and not on a fixed schedule

2) needs maid service fast, when they do need it

3) is willing to take a risk on the quality, and hoping that the premium price they pay is an indication that they'll get quality service.

So ... I'm thinking the target audience is bachelors, people who don't frequently entertain at home, etc.

The one thing that would worry me, as a customer, is whether the by-the-hour payment model might tempt the maids to work slower.
What is most bizarre to me is that someone could actually do this and do it more than once.

Why wouldn't people feel bad about scamming someone like this? You have to talk to someone, get them on your side, and then scam them?

I could maybe imagine myself in an alternate universe doing something like this, perhaps enjoying a sort of "heist" feeling like when you're playing poker and no one's aware that you're totally prepared to take the table. But if I succeeded (at the scamming call) I'm sure I would feel devastated that I just did that to someone.

Maybe I'm just supremely naive, but it seems hard for me to imagine anyone I've ever met in my life scamming someone like this. It seems so completely incredible that it could ever happen on such a large scale.

--------------

Is there something in a culture (besides wealth discrepancy per se) that makes this sort of thing more OK?
Recently stumbled upon very competitively priced DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/price-comparison-chart

They have APIs to manage on-demand instances as well.
Whoa, you mean we've got buttholes, like, all over? Cool. Huh huh huh.
In general, yes. There's a few exceptions, but in general you should have an accessible version for the visually impaired (or, really, any of the groups I list in the article. Are your training videos captioned for the Deaf? Can someone with motion issues navigate your HR site using Tab or adaptive devices? Is the language overly contrived or the font and color choices bad?)
Xnomad – a real tiling window manager for os x.
This astronomical user-base begs the question: why aren't you the most profitable company on the planet right now? You have the users, the money, the connections and the engineering talent. So what's the problem?
Lenticular.js - tilt-controlled images
THis seems really short sighted. I consider IBM's Watson a great achievement, but the people who built it are all technically cogs in IBM's machine.

Achievement is what you feel inside. A large bank account is nice validation of a certain class of achievements, but not the only kind.
But it was invite only until February 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail
I had the exact same thing happen in Canada. Asked for Amazon gift cards for the Kindle I just got for Christmas. Got hundreds of dollars worth. None of it usable for my actual Kindle because they were "Canadian" Amazon not "US" Amazon gift cards.

After being very confused, I was very disappointed.
Based on what I've seen from popular open-source Python projects I've used in the past (Fabric, Haystack and basically anything else by daniel lindsley) having a single human gatekeeper is the express lane to hell. If you do that make sure you have at least a few core contribs who can approve commits.
Firefox has the option to let you set the font and a minimum font size, and will force all sites to stick to it. (Tools -> Options -> Content -> Advanced)

I view the entire internet in Times New Roman 20 pt. I have to turn it off for more complicated sites like amazon, where having giant font in their tiny boxes breaks functionality, but it works beautifully on simple sites like hacker news, where I spend most of my time. (And by "beautifully" I mean, it's butt-ugly, but I can sit back from the computer at a comfortably ergonomic distance and read without straining my eyes.)
What networking issues did you experience with Hetzner?
Looks like the site is down right now. I'm getting a blank page.
I cannot think of any other scene besides this that actually gives a reasonably realistic depiction of someone writing code/hacking. This is a good one!
Your poker analogy is also not really the same thing either. In the scammers case he's already made the decision that him having your money is better than you, but also you haven't actually made a choice to part with your money at the front of the 'game'. In your poker analogy everyone who sits at that table understands the risk of being there.
Maybe. I'm sure it's a calculated risk, but you might want to be careful who you cross when you deal with sovereign nations and seizing their assets. Private lenders don't have standing armies, after all.
David Tisch and Charlie O'Donnell hate on pivoting at NYU
> whether the by-the-hour payment model might tempt the maids to work slower

They purposefully work slower, they don't come next time.
> Are there any stats on how often they find for the corporation vs the consumer?

The corporations choose the arbitration firms. The arbitration firms should know full well who's feeding them. So stats aren't really necessary.

> ... how freely can courts ignore the contract of adhesion in which you "agreed" not to bring a class action?

My understanding is, zero freedom for that.
I have always loved this montage: Let's Enhance -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk
If I get them I generally just put the phone down immediately, or I'll wind them up asking stupid questions about their qualifications. However, my nana has had a few recently who've been super aggressive about it, I told her not to do anything they say and to call me if she's unsure, but apparently saying 'no' and putting the phone down gets you repeat calls if you sound like like a good mark.

Edit: I'll point out, this happens in legitimate call centres as well. I worked for a fairly well known a credit card company and left not long after I heard a top seller say "Focus on old people, scare them enough and they'll always buy".
I will still enjoy programming at 50 and will still want to it for money. But will the ageism in this industry permit that to happen? It feels like the tech culture must change to accept that there are good programmers who aren't in their 20s.
I disagree. On a first production run of a new product, there's the very real possibility it won't work out. Now that they have over 1,000 pre-orders it's obvious that it's a hit, but if you're "backer" #1 you have no idea if it'll come to fruition or not.

What I would agree with is that since they're not collecting $$$ until they ship, there's no risk. But that doesn't mean the term "backer" is misleading. Any early adopter of a new product would be a "backer" of its adoption.

DROdio
Wait, Why Is This Worth Anything?
You could still build an application to troll them, it would just involve reverse engineering the custom protocol and having your program connect out to the proxy.

I guess you would have to be a much more determined troll though with plenty of time on your hands.

If they are using a legit service like logmein I'm surprised they aren't taking more action on this.
Interesting product - I think narrowing the use cases to just the 2, games and content, makes the product flow better than paypal's product:
https://www.paypalobjects.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropaym...

And the fees (on the bottom of the games page) are lower to boot - which is huge because that's basically what micropayments are about, getting the fees low enough that you can sell tiny things at a profit.

I hope they see more traction here than they do with standard website version of google wallet. Their focus on mobile in general, and gaming in this product, does seem to be a good fit.
Wouldn't it be great if there were an MAU attack against Facebook where a group built a system to create billions of active accounts to the point where the MAU number was greater than the computing population of earth?
I wonder if anymore people even pause to think, does the world need this? before trying to sell these products. Maybe this is just a vehicle for someone to point to and say, "I've made something before, even if it is just a toy" on their journey toward something more worthwhile.
The Greatest Hits Are Obvious
Google Maps update brings streetview to iOS6
Pretty crazy post! Congrats to the team for launching and making a big splash.
Microsoft acquires two-way authentication solutions company PhoneFactor
Well, git should be excellent in this case, because it is essentially the same work flow as Linus. Everybody just pulls from each others repo.
Digital Ocean looks pretty sweet, but the advantages by going with EC2 for us are a large number of different Instance Types we can use for every task we have.

It provides us with a lot of flexibility on how to build our service.
"16 year olds making 6 figures writing their own iphone apps "

The reality is there are very few people making six figures writing their own iphone apps. Even fewer that can sustain that level of income as a sole proprietorship for a couple of decades, which is what you will need to do to retire at fifty.

For every programmer who does create a sustainable business, fewer still get rich doing so. One reason, creating a wildly successful business is a completely different skill set from programming. Another reason, it takes a fair amount of luck for a company to become wildly successful.

Goog luck.
Hey @iamjason89, I'm not removing anything -- although I am using a new blogging platform that's still in beta. So maybe that's why it's not working for you. I'll ask @Tynan to reach out to you; he's the creator of the platform.

Sorry for the trouble. Bleeding edge :-/
I wish everyone would start using Dwolla so I could give up on Paypal forever. I think the thing that keeps Paypal on top is since eBay owns them, they basically force you to use Paypal if you want to do any transactions on their site.
Linus is the single gatekeeper of Linux.
It makes a lot of sense to require that a commit must go through at least 1-2 human reviewers before getting merged to master. In addition to going through automated builds and tests, if applicable.

You need more than one person who can commit to master and is responsible for the merges, but you most certainly don't need every contributor to have commit access.
Our maids carry a backpack and come with the supplies, which are all-natural, they need to clean with except for a vacuum/mop/broom (kind of hard to carry these around on a subway!).
Google reaches Digital-Book deal with publishers group
Please Don't Kill Feedburner
Yeah, sorry about that. The good old Hacker News effect. I'm working to get it back up.
Ok, those are some cool plants. One data bit in favor of the plant hypothesis would be the methane blooms that occur on the planet, but sadly that has a more mundane explanation as well : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120531112349.ht...
Builds failed from time to time because the network was simply gone. We worked around the issues by running commands again when they timed out, but it was one of the reasons
(the main reason being that having your own servers is simply not flexible enough) for switching from Hetzner
Just read the two followup posts. It is not that clear within Linux as well.
Has there been any research into running neural networks on DSP architectures? I'd love to try my hand at programming a DSP. Are there any low-cost options for hobbyists?
Diamond Strike iPhone App Acquired for $5,000
Looking at that Analytics graph, it's pretty obvious the number of signups is around 5 on the high end, and 2 on the low end. So, in this case, increasing a conversion rate by 46% is the difference between 3 sign ups instead of 4.

The sample size is so tiny, it's hard to argue that any language changes truly affected conversions.

I'm also noticing a downward trend on the blue line over the month. Whatever was working earlier in the month stopped.
You needn't issue any special CC numbers. "Follow the money" is standard fraud investigation practice, and a defrauded consumer's CC will do just fine. Tracing the transactions back to the processor and merchant account is doable, but it's often a temporary solution. How do you stop them from simply opening another?

When someone establishes a merchant account, they often do so as a corporation. Corporation blacklisted? Start another one. The requirements for opening a merchant account are similar to a standard credit check. If you have no credit history, your terms will be worse, and the bank will probably hold funds for a longer period of time than if you had good credit, but ultimately, that's just a cost of doing business. If there's inbound cash flow to be had, the exercise of managing costs is standard business practice.

To stop them, you have to find the people behind the operation and put them in jail. Given that they're not US-based, that takes time. Most foreign governments have more pressing matters than taking down the scammer that is stealing money from non-constituents.
This is one of Google Maps' hugely understated strengths. I've never found another service that can take a partial address and understand what you mean as well as it does. It was one of my motivations to switch back to Android from Windows Phone.
Love your stuff, laktek. This is a neat tool - I'll definitely being using it for convenience sake.
How do you get around the IO issue? We've been looking at EC2 for, well, forever, but IO performance has always been a huge issue -- to the point where it'd cost more than hosting it ourselves just to scale IO performance to the point where it'd equal a couple self-hosted servers.
Safari will automatically merge all pages into a single page, strip out the ads, and reformat the article using nice legible typography.

Is this fair to the publishers? No. But I'm glad a browser came up with a solution.
I'm not sure exactly what you think a better tool would look like. By your own admission, there are multiple "right" ways to do branch management, and all of them are supported meaningfully by git. But, more or less by definition, a tool that enforced a "right" way to do things would disallow some of these.

So... I don't understand. Do you want a tool that makes the kernel branching style illegal, or one that breaks your own team's workflow? If you want one that supports both, how is that providing clarity about the "right" way to do things?
Measurements show IPv6 network growing albeit slowly
I think it makes more sense to start measuring from the time you started professionally programming ... so if the 57 year old parent has been programming for 33 years that suggests that he's measuring from when he left full time education (24). My apologies if you've been coding professionally since you were 9 though :)
> "The biggest issue I see is the risk of extra-market activity"

Unless Get Maid can provide the users and maids with enough useful features that they see a value in keeping the long-term-arrangement through the system.

e.g. convenient (recurring) payment processing, giving maids increased visibility in one-off job searches based on number of long-term relationships, centralizing maid scheduling [1], factoring maid schedules into one-off job availability, factoring required commute time/distance into job feasibility [2], seamless arrangement of Maid-approved 'fill-in' Maids when they need to take time off or something comes up, centralized 'gig notes' that would be made accessible to any in-system fill-in maids [3], etc.

There's plenty of opportunity for Get Maid to make a compelling pitch to keep everything in-system.

[1] keys being: allowing the maid to set 'availability' to reflect their personal-life scheduling demands (including vacations and such), keeping all job schedules in one place, automatically keeping this calendar up-to-date on their smartphone, etc.

[2] A maid may technically be available at 3pm for another job, but if the 3pm job is uptown and she just wrapped a weekly 2pm gig downtown, it's not going to work. Keeping everything in-system will spare users the hassle of contacting maids who can't actually make the scheduled time and spare the maids the hassle of seeing jobs they can't actually take.

[3] how the client likes the laundry done, high-traffic areas, etc.
Analysis of a /o stealth scan by sality bonnet
server beefed up, should be ok now.
Facebook Is Reading Your Messages and Liking Things For You
Well it gets even better, if you ever dare to try to update your Windows Phone with Zune, your host Windows locale has to be the same as the country you set up your Windows Live ID with.

Godspeed you 21st century travelling multilingual expat.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2452829

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/zune/forum/account-phone/...
You should perhaps be using a rational number datatype instead of floating point arithmetic.

It depends what calculations you're doing: if you need to use transcendental functions then you're stuck with floating point, and you'll have to decide how close two numbers need to be for you to consider them equal. n.b. you need to do this: no programming language can know whether false positives are more or less harmful than false negatives in your program.
0.087 * 900M = 78.3M

Roughly the equivalent of all of Germany's population (with 80M) being Facebook fake users.

Nevertheless I agree.. Impressive low number. Due to the scale of user base this still translates into a ridiculous amount of fake users
US cracks down on Indian online fraud
Isn't NFL utter crap?

When you average an learning algorithms performance over a whole bunch of domains that _NATURE WILL NEVER GENERATE_, all algorithms are equally bad.

Paying attention to the theorem is mostly defeatist and counter-productive.

Imagine some ads serving company improves their learning algorithms 10% and is making 100s of millions more dollars. Are you going to say, well, there are billions of other possible universes in which they'd be losing money, they just got lucky that we don't live in those universes?
Not necessarily true. People store a lot of important personal information on computers, and would hate to lose them.

That's perhaps one of the reasons this scam can be so effective.
Not all services are I/O bound. Hell, it's routine in the modern world to have datasets for real world products that fit in, what, $20 of RAM?
+1. What's going on?
Did you get the inspiration for this from /r/EntrepreneurRideAlong?
I wonder how these guys are organised. Is it just a bunch of people doing this from home who have heard about the scam from a friend and have tried to imitate it?

Or are there actually physical call centres with rows of desks of scammers doing this as a 9-5?
nah it is initially centered in London because it has only data from the UK.
This is definitely a concern we take seriously. Our goal is to not only offer a service that's on-demand, but also provide one of the best cleans you'll have. We do a lot of work vetting and training our maids to ensure quality and trustworthiness. This includes 1) interview, 2) reference checks, 3) a demo clean, and 4) background check...before we bring them onto our system. We train our maids to be as efficient as possible and that it's much better to have a customer twice than to work too slowly once.
I would answer him "Sorry, I use Linux".
But a user is consciously clicking the like button on a website and I believe this is a good indication that they are active. At some point the user is bound to visit facebook because and that's when you can serve the ad.
What? You Don't Spend Most of Your Work Time Coding?
Poll: YC 2005 Alum, how much are you making a year?
Include salary and investment income.
Aside: There seems to be a strange (one-way) attraction between creditors and sailing ships these days. Another example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedov

"Sedov has regularly been targeted by unpaid creditors of the Russian Federation such as Nissim Gaon (of now defunct Swiss group NOGA, an anagram of Gaon) and also by French holders of defaulted Russian bonds; in 2002 Sedov was forced to precipitously and unexpectedly leave Marseilles in the dead of night[1] to avoid being served a writ by AFPER (French association of holders of Russian Empire bonds) the following morning.

For over a year French holders of defaulted Russian bonds have been warning they were going to reorganize and export their claim to Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions, more friendly to private citizens than the French."
Less than 60K
Jolla set to launch its MeeGo OS "Sailfish" in November
It isn't hard to imagine a SCM tool (using GIT internally) that enforces a specific set of curated operations for a particular workflow, that teams could agree to use for a given project. You could have different such tools for different workflows on different projects.

You could even write a meta-tool that allows administrators to define and reify a workflow which would then be enforced for developers on a project.
>You could still build an application to troll them, it would just involve reverse engineering the custom protocol and having your program connect out to the proxy.

And do what? Say you reverse engineer the protocol. Then what? What proxy? Who said anything about a proxy?

>If they are using a legit service like logmein I'm surprised they aren't taking more action on this.

If they're using LogMeIn, good luck reverse engineering. LogMeIn's security is really fantastic. The protocol is encrypted with strong algorithms and has a lot of spoof detection measures in place.

I'd love to hear an explanation of what you think you'd do with this theoretical troll server. I've messed with these guys a lot. They wan't control of your machine so they can install their software, then extort you for money. End of story. If they don't feel like they're moving in that direction, they hang up and move on. I drag them along using social engineering, then let them log in to a VM with nothing on it. I let them install their software, then I find a way to terminate the call and trash the VM.
can confirm the original link is back working now